10.24.2009

EIGHT IS ENOUGH!! PART IV

EIGHT REAL REASONS WHY BILL THOMPSON MUST BE ELECTED MAYOR TO SAVE THE SOUL OF NEW YORK AND WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD BLOOMBERG EVER AGAIN

By Gloria Dulan-Wilson

New Yorkers need to disabuse themselves of any hope of increased affordable homes, or jobs that are geared to New Yorkers. Witness the fact that, according to Barrett, developer Steve Ross, the administration's favorite developer, “was so cozy with city development czar Doctoroff that he assumed a $4 million loan Doctoroff made to the city's Olympic committee shortly before Doctoroff took office. And it's stunning that the mayor himself boldly endorsed the biggest real estate acquisition of all time—the $5.4 billion purchase of Stuy Town—even though the 20 percent owner of Bloomberg LP at the time, Merrill Lynch, was one of the buyers and he was legally barred from doing anything in his official capacity to aid Merrill.”

Isn’t it interesting that the current residents of Stuyvesant town, who had come within $1 million of jointly purchasing the property for themselves, were squelched from doing so? Under the original HUD rules, they should have been awarded the property because of having come in such close approximation to the asking price. The property now is so over priced that the remaining residents are being forced out, and there are no takers for the overpriced vacancies! Additionally, the property is now facing massive financial difficulties (I wonder why?)

That’s a scene that is replicated all over New York City’s 5 Boroughs, where affordable properties have come into the hands of private developers, and have become over priced properties, forcing the original residents into homelessness. Had it not been for the joint efforts of Congressmembers Edolphus Town, Yvette Clarke, Nydia Velazques, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Starrett City, the largest affordable development in New York City with 16,000 families, would have met the same fate. Now, however, high price properties constructed in Manhattan, once reserved for Wall Street purchasers are too high even for them. Also witness the fact that whole blocks of New York, especially in Harlem and other predominantly Black communities were sold wholesale to foreign interests, unbeknown to the residents. And that Harlem sports a Condominium where the studio apartment started at $750,000 -- well out of the reach of the residents in that community.

Who owns New York Now?

So what then of the New York’s middle class working families, and lower income residents? They apparently get no love or support from this Administration. Those who found themselves homeless as a result of the economic downturn, and the sudden mass reduction of jobs, were put on buses to go ‘wherever” as long as they never returned to New York.

DON’T THINK THAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED HAD BILL THOMPSON BEEN MAYOR AT THE TIME. It’s unconscionable!

Bloomberg is proud of his self-financed campaigns, often celebrating the fact that he takes no contributions from anyone. But, per Barrett, “the evidence is mounting—with 33 of Bloomberg LP's top 124 customers having business with the city—that we may be getting the quid without the quo. The mayor's friends and prime-time business supporters appear to be reaping the same rewards as those big donors used to get, only minus the donations, and the circle of insiders that openly rallied to him during the term limits debate is, by and large, the same group that is prospering from his discretionary decisions.” (but I didn’t need to tell you that, did I?)

Barrett cited “The New York City Partnership, co-chaired now by Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein and Rupert Murdoch, (owner of the New York Post and Fox Five News) has become Bloomberg's modern version of an oldline political club. Even as the mayor can make the case that his health initiatives and other priorities benefit the poor, his near 100 rezonings, construction deregulations, generous subsidies, and other policies have fed the aura of a government of, for, and by the elites.”

It's at least a bit awkward that Bloomberg LP's business news channel, a linchpin to the growth of the media giant Mike owns almost entirely himself, But that same media giant failed to warn the city of the impending doom. Don’t you find it amazing that the Mayor of the city hit hardest by the Wall Street down turn, could have the temerity and the gall to stand and brag that he started out with $5 billion, and now he has $16 billion? Forget about Bernie Madoff? How is it that he is realizing a profit while so many New Yorkers suffer? One also wonders how many of Bloomberg’s cronies were given a total pass in the fall of Wall Street.

Who and what and when did he know what he/they knew? How is it that there has been no real action on the part of the Mayor to stop the bloodletting that New York City is suffering from? Where are the initiatives to normalize the cost of housing, the cost of utilities, the glut of properties while more and more families are forced onto the street. The will to privatize in order to give more contracts to cronies, while New Yorkers go begging? Where is the mayor for all people.

NEW YORK CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER DAY OF BLOOMBERG, LET ALONE 4 MORE YEARS